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'TO GRAB' IN THE ARGENTINE SENSE OF THE WORD: THE PITFALLS OF METALINGUAL USE IN SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION[1]
by Sergio Viaggio, United Nations
Abstract
For the simultaneous interpreter, puns and other instances of metalingual use are both a challenge and a nuisance. It is here that the interplay of form and content, pragmatic intention and intended sense comes to the fore, in which case adroitness at determining its relevance on the basis of an instant analysis of the communication situation, with particular attention to the speaker's pragmatic intention and intended sense and the audience's needs and expectations is the only tool that will allow the practitioner to look for an adequate solution, regardless of the degree of spontaneity, the surface features of source- and target-language and even of the interpreter's own rhetorical ability. While the latter may be as decisive as talent, it lends itself less easily to modelling and therefore practising and teaching. On the basis of actual examples from United Nations meetings used to illustrate the different factors affecting the rendition of metalanguage some suggestions are made in order to improve training.
A necessary disclaimer
Let me tee off with a caveat: although I have taught and lectured at several interpretation and translation schools and published more or less extensively, I do not belong in academia, nor am I a bona fide translation/interpretation researcher. My only qualifications stem from twenty odd years of practising, observing, studying and pondering. Over the last four, I have been lucky enough to be able to watch literally hundreds of interpreters at work from a uniquely privileged vantage position, that of Chief of the Interpretation Section with the United Nations Office at Vienna (the third of the Organization, after New York and Geneva). What follows are admittedly personal conclusions. Even so, I have attempted to systematize my professional experience in a theoretical frame and relate it to existing work in interpretation studies in such a way as to make it relevant to both training and further research. Also, as Chief Interpreter, it is part of my job to evaluate my interpreters' performance. Hence the unabashedly normative tilt of what now begins.
Introduction
Although they do not say so, I would submit that simultaneous interpretation falls within what followers of the Spanish translemic school call constrained translation - i.e. translation subject to constraints extralinguistic but inherent to the text, as in the case of advertisements (space/image-constrained), dubbing (time/image-constrained) and subtitling (time/space-constrained) (Mayoral et al 1988; Rabadán 1991): interpretation is, after all, very much time-constrained. Another specific --and decisive-- constraint is the co-presence of the speaker's and the interpreters' respective audiences, which means that, unlike readers of translated documents, they witness each other's reaction to what they hear: An untranslated pun normally goes unnoticed by the readers of the translation, but if one of the audiences at a meeting laugh, the others know that something funny is going on - and unless they are let in on whatever has caused their neighbours' hilarity, they will feel excluded, and publicly so to boot. All that can be said and propounded about the translation of puns, metaphors, literary allusions, and metalanguage (in the sense developed by Jakobson 1959) in general, must thus take into account this latter fact and be sifted through the implacable real-time filter the interpreter is subject to. Gile's 1985, 1988, 1995a and 1995b model of competing efforts is a useful tool to assess the additional load that metalingual use poses on the interpreter's attention. These efforts are: listening/analysing, short-term memory, and production. While it is obviously true that any additional attention to the form of the linguistic input (including, but definitely not limited to, its stylistic markers) cannot but detract from the processing or elocutionary effort, it is equally a fact, on the relief side, that the interpreter is very much helped by all relevant features of face-to-face orality: the evanescence of words (García Landa 1985), the multi-sensorial, analogical/in-parallel perception of the non-verbal data from the participants (Bühler 1985, Poyatos 1993)[2], plus the ability to resort to his own paralanguage to stress or produce modal information, including humour. This is fundamental: As can be gathered from examples 3.3 and 3.4 below, unlike the translator, the interpreter may, I submit, legitimately substitute his own sense of humour for the speaker's, achieving the same perlocutionary effect on his own, as it were. I am not referring here to some widespread cases, such as the interpreter asking his audience to laugh at an untranslated joke (see, for instance, Bertone 1989 or Pöchhacker 1993). This is indeed a legitimate last resort, but let us not forget that the audience ends up laughing at the speaker rather than at his joke. In this light, I think that, in the booth, the problems with translating puns loose some of their specificity and become more aptly categorized, at least initially, with those of translating all stylistically marked surface features of the message in hand, including, first and foremost, metalingual use. And since, to my knowledge, this is the first time the subject is being dealt with in its specifically interpretational frame (barring, of course, Pöchhacker 1993, which deals exclusively with jokes), this is the way I intend to tackle it. I shall not speak about the interpreter's own intentional or unintentional puns, which deserve a separate study; let me just point out that the fact that they exist and can pose problems is but one of the many differences between translation and interpretation, which is but an extension of the general difference between written and oral speech. May I leave the reader with a personal example of such an unintended pun by the interpreter: Several years ago, the USSR delegation at the UN Headquarters in New York wished to meet the Latin American group. In his politically loaded exhortation, the Soviet Ambassador proffered 'Gosudarstva, objedinjonnyje v shirokyj djemokraticheskij front, sumjejut pobjedit nad vragami podlinnoj demokratii' [States, united in a broad democratic front shall overcome the enemies of genuine democracy']. My intended rendition was 'Los estados, unidos en un amplio frente democrático, derrotarán a los enemigos de la auténtica democracia', except that I misplaced the pause, so that I sounded as if was saying 'Los Estados Unidos, en un amplio frente democrático...'. ['The United States, in a broad democratic front...']. I survived thanks to a benign monocultural audience (they simply smiled at me and each other, all of them, from Cuba to Guatemala): I do not think that I would have escaped scot-free in any other booth.
1. Six factors affecting the rendition of stylistic markers
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In simultaneous interpretation, there are, to my mind, basically six independent if sometimes overlapping series of factors influencing the rendition of, or compensation for, wordplay and other stylistically marked features of speech. Two of them are strictly objective and have to do respectively with the nature of discourse and the pair of languages involved. The other four relate to the interpreter's profile: Two have to do with the interpreter's own analysis of the communication situation[3] (including, on the one hand, the speaker's pragmatic intention and intended sense, as well as the audience's needs and expectations, and, on the other, their relevant background knowledge, including their ability to understand, and readiness to accept, linguistic calques and verbatim quotations in the original language); and two have to do with the interpreter's knowledge of the original language and culture and with his own rhetorical ability and disposition. Let us now examine these factors more closely:
i) The spontaneity/non-spontaneity of the original: If impromptu (intended or unintended) wordplay or other stylistic markers by definition cannot require much more effort than other aspects of spontaneous speech, the simultaneous interpreter cannot afford to devote to them an amount of effort that would otherwise hamper the rest of his interpretation. In other words, he must manage a quasi-spontaneous rendition or forget about it altogether. The situation becomes even less manageable when the speaker has prepared his speech --and therefore his puns-- beforehand - even if the interpreter has been given the text in advance: Non-spontaneous wordplay may be so sophisticated as to defy translation, especially since, whatever his prowess, the interpreter's fluency in his active language suffers inevitably in the booth.
ii) The structural/lexical differences between the specific languages: Wordplay being a play on form, the more similar the forms available to the interpreter, the lesser the effort required to re-create or, more easily, reproduce the original pun. As a matter of fact, barring some extent of similarity at the relevant levels (from the phonetic to the semantic), it may well prove altogether impossible to recreate it. In this regard, I beg most respectfully and cordially to disagree with my admired Seleskovitch and Lederer: structural differences and similarities between the languages do indeed affect interpretation - if much less than mediocre interpreters believe.
iii) The relative interpenetration of the respective languages and cultures: Whatever the booth they are listening to, most delegates at a conference will understand or even prefer linguistic calques from English, but not so readily --if at all-- from other languages. As to literary allusions, they travel best when the road has already been paved by interpenetration: the Bible, having been carried by more powerful modern armies, fares better than the Koran; while the rest of the cultivated world knows Shakespeare better than most cultivated English speakers know the rest of the cultivated world. We are dealing here with the linguistic and cultural background knowledge that the interpreter's audience can be presumed to share with the speaker and/or the interpreter.
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iv) The situational relevance of form: The relative importance of wordplay, both original and reproduced, as well as of any other stylistic marker, is a function of the relative importance of form in the specific case. For instance, wordplay may well be out of place or asinine in the original to begin with, in which case the interpreter is normally better advised to forgive and forget it - unless, of course, he is out to get back at the speaker (see Robinson 1990:173-4). A rule of thumb would be that if reproduction of a pun --or any other element, for that matter-- would violate the maxims of manner, relation or quantity, in principle it is better to let it go (except for correcting some obviously unintended mistakes, quality is, unfortunately, outside the interpreter's power to censure)[4].
v) The interpreter's own knowledge of the source language culture(s) and literature(s) (in the case of languages such as English, and to a lesser extent French, one can hardly speak of a single culture or literature): literary and cultural allusions can only be recognized as such if the interpreter knows the source. That applies not only to original authors, but also to canonic translations, such as King James's Bible and Fitzgerald's Rubayat, as well as to the idiosyncrasies of games such as baseball and cricket and the lore crystallized in proverbs and other fixed sayings and locutions.
vi) The interpreter's mastery of the target language and rhetorical prowess: A quick-witted interpreter who is a master of his tongue and fond of wordplay, as well as adept at using puns profusely in his own spontaneous speech, will find it much easier to produce a similar kind of discourse in the booth[5], so that a well-read professional proficient at tongue-in-cheekness will find it both easier and more fun to cope with all manner of stylistic markers.
As pointed out above, these factors are qualitatively different: i and ii are merely descriptive and their value is but statistical; awareness of them does not help the interpreter that much. Factors iii, iv, v and vi, on the other hand, have to do with professional competence and are thus essential for practice and training. I shall, therefore, concentrate upon them.
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2.1. Shared knowledge - the interpreter's chart
The successful route from intended to apprehended sense is to be charted through the waters of shared knowledge. I define apprehended sense as the vector resulting from the linguistic meaning of an utterance and the background knowledge brought to bear by the receivers in order to interpret the speaker's vouloir dire (Viaggio 1992b and 1996). It is the interpreter's task to assess his audience's relevant background knowledge in order to ensure that his rendition will be understood and accepted as intended by the speaker. It is part of such task to determine whether and to what extent the audience is able to understand, and ready to accept, the intrusion of a foreign language in the interpreter's rendition (is it at all acceptable or even preferable, for instance, not to translate cherchez la femme, real-politik, scanner, or yes, we have no bananas?). It is equally part of the task to ascertain whether a literary allusion will be perceived as such (many will grasp it in 'ser o no ser' [to be or not to be], but few in 'el desdén con que el mérito topa en los indignos' [the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes] from the same monologue).
2.2. Relevance - the interpreter's compass
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Of all the merchandise on board the original utterance, it is essential that all that which is relevant for commerce between speaker and addressee arrive safely and unencumbered. As with the rest of interpretation in particular, but also of translation in general, the rendition of wordplay and other markers, the ability, willingness and decision to render or compensate for it, and how, are a matter of compromise on the basis of relevance; i.e. the efficiency of the effort required in order for the interpreter and/or the audience to process the formal information in terms of the relevant informativity gained or lost (and in this respect, I find Gutt's 1990 & 1991 application of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory highly relevant - if within Tirkonnen-Kondit's 1992 insightful criticisms[6]). As a matter of fact, of all four factors anent the interpreter's professional competence, this is the one that leaves the most room for manoeuvre. It is the assessment of this factor that governs the interpreter's strategic choice on whether to strive for some kind of a rendition or not. As pointed out above, metalingual use requires specific attention to the surface features of the original (which normally go all but unnoticed by the veteran practitioner who de-verbalizes[7] automatically), and necessitates a more refined elocutionary effort, but more than anything it taxes the interpreter's processing ability. First, he must decide what is the propositional content of the segment in question or its contribution to intended sense, i.e. to what the speaker really --or, if the worst comes to the worst, mainly-- means to say, since, barring extremes, this is the non-negotiable element. Second, he must assess whether stylistic losses or compromises are acceptable (or advisable) and if so to what degree. Third, and on that basis, he must proceed to think of an adequate translation/recreation/compensation (complete, partial or zero). All of this between hearing and speaking. Real time and rhetorical ability act as the implacable objective and subjective limits of this effort. Often, much energy is wasted on rendering a pun unnecessarily or mistakenly: unnecessarily due to its limited relevance in the specific instance, or mistakenly in that the rendition misses the illocutionary point, i.e. the sense driven at by the speaker (as illustrated by Pöchhacker 1993). It does happen that, having assessed correctly the relevance and pragmatic value of an utterance, the interpreter feels nevertheless unable to do it justice. In such cases, as always, the alternative to a good translation is not a bad one, but none at all (see Viaggio 1992a).
Another crucial element, of course, is elocution: if retaining or explaining the pun would force the interpreter into inordinate speed, it is better to relinquish it, since inordinate speed is the number one violation of the maxim of manner - the worst enemy of intelligibility (especially in the interpreter's case, whose speech is normally more affected by hesitations, false starts, misplaced pauses and awkward lexical and syntactic choices than the speaker's). In the booth, speed is inversely proportional to fluency.
A third decisive feature is the degree to which an effort to reproduce the pun may affect the rest of the interpretation. Short-term memory is, alas, all too short, and the interpreter can ill afford to linger for too long on any particular hurdle, lest he should miss any relevant information coming in next.
Granted, deciding on the pragmatic intention behind an utterance's stylistic markers or the relevance they may have for its addressees is very tricky. Again, an essential aspect of the interpreter's responsibility --and therefore competence-- should be, precisely, such accurate surgical reading of all relevant formants, i.e constituting factors (see Lvovskaja 1985 and Viaggio 1996) of the communicative situation, since only on such a basis can he develop and apply the right interpretational strategy - including, but definitely not limited to, any instances of metalingual use. In general, delegates are convinced that whatever they say and the way they say it is patently relevant; and at times they, or someone in their delegation, are monitoring the interpretation and counting words, like the character in Leopoldo Marechal's Adan Buenosayres who listens to the organ at his daughter's wedding just to check whether the organist is not cheating him of a semiquaver (vide infra). In such cases the interpreter's leeway is obviously reduced: he is interpreting not only --or even mainly, as is often the case in the Chinese booth-- for the audience but for the speaker himself or whomever is monitoring him in the delegation. There are, indeed, a myriad variables to be taken into account, but the interpreter seldom has the time to do so. If he is to produce an adequate simultaneous interpretation, he simply must reduce them to a manageable handful. I suggest that what normally counts first is acceptability to the target audience, and, particularly, communicative relevance: the interpreter is, after all, speaking to them, while the speaker, after all, generally wishes to be understood. Thus, only an adequate assessment of relevance can begin to lead the interpreter towards an adequate solution, as I shall endeavour to show in the examples below.